Re: Commercial .debs

[Jules Bean <jmlb2@hermes.cam.ac.uk>]

On Fri, 8 Jan 1999, Bill Mitchell wrote:

> 
> 
> There are at least two possible ways in which commercial organizations
> might release .debs:  (1) via non-free on the debian distribution sites,
> and (2) by putting the .debs on their commercial CDs and/or their own
> web sites.  Obviously, the debian project can exercise some control over
> the former, but would have no direct control over the latter.
> 
> Also, it seems to me that it would be adviseable for the packager of a
> commercial .deb to be a debian developer --  either a developer who is
> already on the project for other reasons who acts as maintainer for the
> commercial package, or a developer from the commercial organization who
> joins the project for the limited purpose of maintaining the commercial
> .deb.  Note that in the second case, it would probably be adviseable to
> have a low-traffic mailing list for commercial package maintainers --
> it might not be attractive to the commercial organization to accept
> the overhead of one of their on-staff developers spending paid time
> tracking debian-devel.

Of course, they might not want to be a debian developer.

Note that, currently, to be a debian developer you have to agree with the
DFSG.  Commercial developers might well not..

Perhaps we could afford them a quasi-developer status.  Alternatively,
they could easily use our support infrastructure (the mailing lists,
-mentors in particular) without being developers.  Although, presumably we
need their key in the keyring for them to make uploads..

 Jules

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